NO: TOXIC WASTE TOO DANGEROUS

The 1976 Nuclear Safeguards Act bars new nuclear plants in California until there is a solution to the high-level radioactive waste problem. Thirty-seven years later, there is still none. Two-thirds of a century after the first reactor waste was created, we still don’t know what to do with the toxic garbage.

Thankfully, the atomic genie is getting put back in its bottle, and we are all safer for it. The permanent closure of the crippled San Onofre reactors, with more than eight million people living within 50 miles, is but the latest sign. Earlier this year, having developed a containment structure crack in a botched effort to replace its steam generators, the Crystal River nuclear plant in Florida also was shut down forever. Last month, the Kewaunee Power Station’s owners in Wisconsin decided to close it. And plans for new reactors keep getting scrapped. The much-touted “nuclear renaissance” has fortunately never materialized; indeed, the gearshift has been thrown hard in reverse.

Radioactive waste is tremendously dangerous. Plutonium-239, for example, if inhaled in quantities as small as a millionth of an ounce, will cause cancer with a virtual 100 percent statistical certainty. The nation’s nuclear plants have produced hundreds of tons of plutonium alone. It is among the most dangerous of the waste products, toxic to humans for as much as half a million years. It and the other long-lived radionuclides in high-level waste need to be isolated from the environment for periods vastly longer than any government has even existed. We have no idea what to do with this devilish creation. The latest effort to develop a national storage center in Yucca Mountain, Nev. was finally shelved after considerable expense, because it was not a safe enough site — and already too small.

Perhaps the biggest problem with nuclear power is its connection to the proliferation of atomic bombs. Each San Onofre reactor, for example, produced enough weapons-usable plutonium annually to make 100 A-bombs. The technology to enrich uranium for power plants can readily enrich to the bomb-grade levels, as demonstrated by the international concerns about Iran’s activities. The world cannot survive if we do not reverse proliferation risks, and we cannot do that while proliferating civil uses of the same materials and technologies.

Then there is the nuclear terrorism risk. Each nuclear plant is in some fashion a pre-emplaced nuclear weapon for our adversaries. While reactors cannot blow up like an atomic bomb, they can release vast quantities of fallout if a malevolent force successfully disrupted the cooling sufficient to cause a meltdown. Each San Onofre unit, for example, contained a thousand times the long-lived radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.

What a terrorist can do by intent, the forces of nature can do by chance. As we saw tragically at Fukushima, an earthquake can destroy the ability to cool reactors’ core, resulting in meltdowns. Equipment can fail; operators can make errors with catastrophic consequences. Vast quantities of volatile, biologically active radionuclides such as iodine-131, cesium-137, and strontium-90 can be released if the fuel melts. Radioiodine causes thyroid cancer; cesium is a powerful gamma emitter that can irradiate the whole body causing a range of cancers; strontium-90 concentrates in bone, causing bone cancer and leukemia. Thirty years ago, the NRC estimated that a San Onofre accident could result in 130,000 immediate deaths from Hiroshima-type acute radiation syndrome, 300,000 cancers, and 600,000 genetic effects, for more than a million total casualties.